No tv or pop music for you, missy
Ah yes, the Amish. Who would ever have thought that a religious sect that isolates its members would turn out to have a nasty habit of raping its own daughters and sisters? Besides everyone who thinks about it for a minute?
As a child, Sadie* was carefully shielded from outside influences, never allowed to watch TV or listen to pop music or get her learner’s permit. Instead, she attended a one-room Amish schoolhouse and rode a horse and buggy to church—a life designed to be humble and disciplined and godly.
And very safe for rapey boys and men.
By age 9, she says, she’d been raped by one of her older brothers. By 12, she’d been abused by her father, Abner*, a chiropractor who penetrated her with his fingers on the same table where he saw patients, telling her he was “flipping her uterus” to ensure her fertility. By 14, she says, three more brothers had raped her and she was being attacked in the hayloft or in her own bed multiple times a week. She would roll over afterward, ashamed and confused. The sisters who shared Sadie’s room (and even her bed) never woke up—or if they did, never said anything, although some later confided that they were being raped too. Sadie’s small world was built around adherence to rules—and keeping quiet was one of them. “There was no love or support,” she says. “We didn’t feel that we had anywhere to go to say anything.”
All rules, and no love. Lots of rape, and no way to escape from it.
This god sure as hell hates women.
So she kept quiet, even when the police asked questions.
Even on the day when, almost two years later, Abner was sentenced by a circuit court judge to just five years’ probation.
And even on the day when, at 14, she says she was cornered in the pantry by one of her brothers and raped on the sink, and then felt a gush and saw blood running down her leg, and cleaned up alone while he walked away, and gingerly placed her underwear in a bucket of cold water before going back to her chores. A friend helped her realize years later: While being raped, she had probably suffered a miscarriage.
It’s as if the males in her family saw her as an appliance, not a person. Did they get that from their god?
Sarah McClure, the author of the piece, says it’s everywhere:
Over the past year, I’ve interviewed nearly three dozen Amish people, in addition to law enforcement, judges, attorneys, outreach workers, and scholars. I’ve learned that sexual abuse in their communities is an open secret spanning generations. Victims told me stories of inappropriate touching, groping, fondling, exposure to genitals, digital penetration, coerced oral sex, anal sex, and rape, all at the hands of their own family members, neighbors, and church leaders.
And these men all, it seems fair to assume, see themselves as particularly godly and devout and holy and thus “good” – yet they have no compunction about repeatedly raping their own sisters and daughters.
In my reporting, I identified 52 official cases of Amish child sexual assault in seven states over the past two decades. Chillingly, this number doesn’t begin to capture the full picture. Virtually every Amish victim I spoke to—mostly women but also several men—told me they were dissuaded by their family or church leaders from reporting their abuse to police or had been conditioned not to seek outside help (as Sadie put it, she knew she’d just be “mocked or blamed”). Some victims said they were intimidated and threatened with excommunication. Their stories describe a widespread, decentralized cover-up of child sexual abuse by Amish clergy.
“We’re told that it’s not Christlike to report,” explains Esther*, an Amish woman who says she was abused by her brother and a neighbor boy at age 9. “It’s so ingrained. There are so many people who go to church and just endure.”
Wait. It’s not Christlike to report. But is it Christlike to rape?
Why is the onus on the victims to shut up and endure the constant assaults, and not on the boys and men to refrain from assaulting their sisters and daughters? What about telling the men to be “Christlike” first?
T here’s no one reason for the sexual abuse crisis in Amish Country. Instead, there’s a perfect storm of factors: a patriarchal and isolated lifestyle in which victims have little exposure to police, coaches, or anyone else who might help them; an education system that ends at eighth grade and fails to teach children about sex or their bodies; a culture of victim shaming and blaming; little access to the technology that enables communication or broader social awareness; and a religion that prioritizes repentance and forgiveness over actual punishment or rehabilitation. Amish leaders also tend to be wary of law enforcement, preferring to handle disputes on their own.
But the religion seems to prioritize repentance and forgiveness not just over punishment or rehabilitation but also over not raping. Over stopping. Never mind punishment, what about stopping? What exactly is the repentance if the raping never stops?
It’s common for Amish victims to be viewed by the community as just as guilty as the abuser—as consenting partners committing adultery, even if they’re children. Victims are expected to share responsibility and, after the church has punished their abuser, to quickly forgive. If they fail to do so, they’re the problem.
When the rare case does end up in court, the Amish overwhelmingly support the abusers, who tend to appear with nearly their entire congregations behind them, survivors and law enforcement sources say. This can compound the trauma of speaking out. “We’ve had cases where there’ll be 50 Amish people standing up for the offender and no one speaks for the victim,” says Stedman.
Does God hate women? Looks that way.
Years ago, this dark, abusive, rapey side of the Amish was exposed and explored in some of the Skeptic/Atheist literature, and I remember bringing it up in my women’s group. They at first refused to believe it. The Amish were peaceful; the Amish were spiritual; the Amish had the wisdom to reject this horrible, capitalist, hurried culture to live simply and humbly in Nature. They assumed instead that my “ mean” sources were picking on them for using curative herbs or something.
As I gave more details, the pushback shifted a bit. Well, okay, maybe … but even so, the Amish way of life was better.
I thought of it as the “Bonnet Effect.” Oh, look … bonnets!
Could be that the Holy Amish use their Bibles to kindle fires.
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https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+5&version=KJV
They still use “bundling boards” but I guess consensual sexual contact just doesn’t have the same frisson…
Sastra – Indeed. I posted about it here long long long ago, and later touched on it in the book (doesgodhatewomen). It’s been known by those who are paying attention for some time.
Yes, here we go, way back in 2005.
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2005/deference/
Hey, but they’re good with God as long as they don’t use zippers and velcro, right?/s
Of course, the insular nature of the community is a huge part of the picture–a single abusive father will sire both daughters who are taught that abuse is normal, and sons who are taught how to abuse; once one member of the community starts committing these atrocities, it only takes a few generations for it to spread like a malignant tumor through the whole group. Much like the Catholic abuse scandal, by the time things start coming to light, the disease is so widespread that removing it would probably be fatal to the community. So even when they are forced to acknowledge the problem, they just opt to pluck around the edges, ignoring and excusing the matter in order to stay in denial.
My husband grew up in Iowa, near a large Amish community. Most of the people in his hometown did not believe that.
Oh come on, stop writing about all these privileged cis women who were multiple raped as children. Write about trans women, who have REAL problems, like being called the wrong pronouns!
(Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)
dsp, you get it, don’t you? You understand that being raped is actually a positive thing, because it validates their womanhood. It affirms that the world sees them as female, and they can be bigly happy, bigly confident. Win-win all around.
(Yeah, I couldn’t resist, either.)
Freemage @7, that’s spot on. When a similar situation came to light on Pitcairn Island one of the concerns was that if all of the able bodied men who had committed offences were jailed the community would collapse for lack of labour.
Police and prosecutors believe that the cases tried amounted to less than a third of the cases they were aware of. Notably, few of the defendants claimed the assaults never took place. Rather they claimed that British law did not apply on the Island and that underage sex had always been the common practice.
While the specifics differ from the Amish case, I think the dynamics are actually very similar.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitcairn_sexual_assault_trial_of_2004
Reminds me of Mormons and FLDS
A Canberra lawyer I knew years ago found himself defending a farm worker from an isolated location who for whatever reason was up on a charge of bestiality; specifically of performing sexual acts with sheep under his care. The worker was found guilty and sentenced to a short jail term. so after the verdict said lawyer went to the nearest pub to let off steam and calm himself down. An old friend of his called Jim was in there, so he got regaled with the story. Then, in his capacity as an authority on rural Australia, and particularly the Northern Territory, Jim observed: “if they jailed every man guilty of that offence, it would be the ruin of the entire pastoral industry.”
Moral: still waters run deep.
That’s Biblical.
And later on in Matthew (21 to 23) you get this gem:
In other words the onus is never on the perpetrator to change their behaviour. It is always on the abused party – under threat of eternal torment – to forgive.
This is talked up as one of the good parts of the Bible, but I think it is actually the greatest example of the sheer disgusting, despicable immorality of the character, Jesus Christ. This isn’t divine wisdom, it is a license for abusers to continue their abuse right up until the deathbed when they repent.
Bruce @#14:
True enough.
But dusting off my old hardly worn theological hat and putting it on, that is not a licence to abuse, molest, rape and kill on the part of the abuser, but rather a demand on the victim to question the wisdom of retaliation and to consider holding off on it. As Gandhi is said to have put it: “An eye for an eye will go on until the whole world is blind.”
(Though in reality, ‘turn the other cheek’ has been an injunction honoured far more in the breach than in the observance.)
Being able to hit back with devastating force and yet not doing it puts one on stronger and morally higher ground IMHO than being unable to do so and having no alternative but to cop sweet whatever is being dished out. Importantly, it also enhances one’s self-esteem.
Any martial arts instructor will tell you that, and I have known a few in my time. They will also usually say that avoiding the inevitable danger of physical combat is best, but if it is unavoidable, you had best be sufficiently well trained to be able to win it.
JC was a creature of his times, and spoke the language of his day. I believe that most of his followers were women; trying to survive in the Roman bloody Empire..
Omar
No, it absolutely is a license for abuse as can be seen in this case with the Amish.
The thing with any act that requires forgiveness is that one doesn’t have to strike back in order to not forgive. Not forgiving someone can be as simple as cutting them out of your life, acting with the knowledge of what they have done in order to prevent them doing it again.
One doesn’t have to go for an eye-for-an-eye, but it isn’t unreasonable to get out of a bad situation and refuse to go back to it. Nor is it bad to feel anger over being mistreated and to demand justice for it, or at least that some work go into repairing the damage caused in such cases. This is all part of just about every legal system currently in use.
You may talk about how good it feels to be able to respond with devastating force and choosing not to do it – but what about situations where choosing not to do it leaves the victim trapped? Going to the cops when you’ve been repeatedly raped by your family can be responding with devastating force, do you think the victims felt good about not using it?
Jesus’ words to Peter, when asked about how many times Peter should forgive his brother, demonstrates that the onus was not on Peter’s brother to change his behaviour. The onus was on Peter to forgive it over and over again. So far as advice was concerned, it was advice designed to maintain a toxic relationship.
And with the Amish that is exactly what is going on. The requirement to forgive those who have done individuals within the community harm, is used as a means of shielding those abusers from facing consequences that might just work to stop the abuse.
What we see in practice with the doctrine of forgiveness is that it is absolutely a license to abuse.
Bruce’s whole comment is spot on, I think, but the above bit is worth repeating. This is ‘advice’ designed to ensure social cohesion. Social cohesion is morally neutral. it can be a good thing. It can also be a very bad thing, as when deployed to suppress dissenting views, marginalise minorities, maintain power balances or silence victims.
We see this tactic deployed widely and repeatedly in any number of circumstances.
Bruce and Rob:
You are both quite right re sexual abuse, and no woman IMHO should ever hesitate in any circumstance over reporting any abuser to the cops, even if only because not doing so will most likely encourage the bastard to keep doing it.
But in a Bible-bound community like the Amish, one of the resources the ‘elders’ use to maintain the sort of control they want is control of information; particularly re the people they wish to keep in subjection. So no outside sources, only the Bible to read, and read on their terms.
In the example cited by Bruce at #14 above, JC is talking not just of of male against male sin, but literally brother against brother sin. (NB it was not ‘neighbour against neighbour.’). It could have been picking his brother’s pocket, going for a ride on his brother’s donkey without permission, stealing his brother’s donkey, selling it and keeping the proceeds to drink his way through later: stuff like that.
If the outrage was raping his brother’s wife, in the Jewish context of the time that would have IMHO been seen as one helluva breach of one helluva list of commandments, both a sin against the brother and a sin against the wife, and a sin against the Jewish Law. (NB Modern Pakistani Muslims would probably see it differently, as on my understanding any woman who gets raped outside of marriage is automatically guilty of something or other, and inside marriage the crime does not exist.)
To JC, social cohesion was paramount in his contemporary volatile context. There had been what amounted to a civil war between rival Jewish factions going on for over 100 years in Judea, from the Macabbean revolt 167 to 160 BCE against Hellenism leading eventually to the Jewish-Roman wars of 66 to 135 CE and the destruction of the Temple. Unfortunately for the Jews, their well-watered ‘promised land’ straddled a highway between Egypt and the European and Asiatic worlds beyond, and so was quite strategic in the eyes of most powers around. And there was no shortage of local revolutionaries busting to have a go at the Romans and for independence.
I think as JC saw it, the Jews were in a no-win situation, (and in many ways still are.) He was trying (unsuccessfully) to come up with a strategy of avoiding war with a superior military power.
Well, JC lost that one.
And I do not think he would have had much time for the Amish.
Where in the bible is rape portrayed as a sin against the raped woman?
OB: Women in the OT were treated as booty of war, as per the WP link below.
If the first 3 Gospels are anything to go by, Yeshua bar Joseph, aka Jesus Christ, saw himself as a reformer, and came up with same pretty radical statements markedly at variance with the OT, such as the Golden Rule. “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you”. That only works for rapists if they don’t mind being raped themselves: which would probably exclude most of them.
JC might have thought that up for himself, but it more likely came across to the ME from China (via the Silk Road, opened in 130 BCE) and arguably originating with Confucius.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_in_the_Hebrew_Bible)
In modern times little has changed. Gang-rape of women Vietcong by those armies fighting for the Saigon Mafia, including Americans and Australians, was commonplace in the Vietnam War of 1965-75. As far as I can gather, it commonly ended with the shooting of the woman in cold blood; which covered the gang-rapists’ tracks, and bound the partipants to silence, as in omerta. Both Stanley Karnow’s and Paul Ham’s (Australian) authoritative books on the Vietnam War are stone silent on it, neither mentioning rape in their indices; which IMHO is a dead giveaway that it was common, if not rife.) Because it must have happened, even if we only go from anectodal evidence. (I heard secondhand one firsthand account.) And if it was frowned upon and a serious chargeable offence in the eyes of the officer hierarchy, that would have been emphasised as a glorious and redeeming fact in their own favour.
And for another angle, Sarah Ruden:
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https://www.uscatholic.org/church/scripture-and-theology/2012/04/putting-paul-his-place